‘Boop!’ Broadway Review: First Barbie, Now Betty Gets Dragged Into the 21 Century

You’ve won 16 Grammy Awards and now want to write your first Broadway musical. What source material do you pick? There are so many great novels, movies, straight plays and TV shows out there to choose from.

David Foster, the composer of such hit songs as “I Will Always Love You” and “The Power of Love,” chose a cartoon character born in the Great Depression. You might remember Betty Boop if you’re really old. She’s the curvaceous icon from the 1930s that gave little boys boners before they knew what sex was all about.

“Boop!” is the new musical by Foster that opened Monday at the Broadhurst Theatre. It’s “boop-oop-a-doop” for a show that needs a good spritz of Pooph.

If you’re too young to know about Betty Boop, you will have seen movies that tell this basic story much better. In “Barbie,” the Barbie and Ken dolls are transported to the real world where she becomes a feminist and he becomes a male chauvinistic pig. In “Pleasantville,” a “Father Knows Best” family is transported to the real world when they discover sex. In “The Brady Bunch Movie,” the famous TV family walks out the front door to be transported into the real world of violence and corruption.

When Betty Boop leaves her 1930s cartoon world in “Boop!,” she’s transported (don’t ask how) to a Comic Con convention in New York City where she discovers … color. She also discovers some of the ugliest costumes, by Gregg Barnes, that have ever graced a Broadway stage. After singing “In Color,” Betty makes friends and falls in love immediately with a man (Ainsley Melham, being oddly remote) not in comic book drag. Betty greases her way into the future, as well as the real world, as if she had just bathed in Vaseline. There’s no conflict. She just spreads her joy to a city that appears to be doing fine without her.

Foster and lyricist Susan Birkenhead load “Boop!” with so many anthems they appear to be auditioning for some new “I Love NY” ad campaign. As for Foster’s tunes, you will leave the Broadhurst humming them, because you’ve heard them all before, whether it is caterwauling gospel or anemic jazz or the ubiquitous female power ballad.

It is questionable whether anyone involved with this musical ever watched a Betty Boop cartoon. Birkenhead’s lyrics describe the newly neutered character on stage: “She is strong, she is smart, open mind, open heart” … and later, “She has spunk, she has spine, she’s a saint.”

Sorry, Betty Boop was one hot number. Where’s the part about her being a great lay? That’s why all those barnyard critters were chasing her around the hayloft. No less an entity than the Hays Office censored Betty Boop back in 1935, making her a far more demure and less sexy character. “Boop!” has clearly taken its orders from a Depression-era right-wing censor.

Playing Betty, Jasmine Amy Rogers isn’t given much to do other than squeal cutely. There’s a reason for her new blandness, and that’s because Betty, like Barbie before her, is now a feminist. As Bob Martin’s meandering and relentlessly unfunny book does manage to make evident, the cartoon character is known for hitting other cartoon characters over the head with all sorts of lethal objects. No problem. They’re cartoons.

On stage, it’s a different story. One of the musical’s subplots involves a blowhard who’s running to be mayor of New York. This politician makes an odd brief appearance in Act 1, but gets much more stage time when Betty joins his campaign in Act 2. Spreading her usual cheer, she gives the guy a lot of good press. Playing that creep, Erich Bergen singlehandedly turns “Boop!” into something worth watching after nearly two hours of total tedium. Because he’s stealing her show, Betty hits him over the head with a desk lamp. He’s knocked out cold and never recovers, only to be rolled off stage in an office chair.

This is feminism? When a man clobbers a woman into unconsciousness, even on the stage, he goes to jail. In “Boop!,” he’s the one who ends up in an orange jump suit for the curtain call.

Jerry Mitchell directs and choreographs. I thought the song “In Color, set at the Comic Con convention and populated with Marvel-like icons, was this theater season’s worst staged musical number. But no, that comes just ahead of intermission when Betty visits Times Square to meet other cartoon icons there.

It’s difficult to say what’s more embarrassing: the people in Disney outfits out on the street or the chorus at the Broadhurst in costumes that look just as seedy and smelly. Pooph, anyone?  

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